From Lab to Market: Bio-Based Products Are Gaining Momentum

Using living organisms to create protected materials that break down completely within the environment — where they will act as nutrients or feedstock for brand new growth — is only one example of a burgeoning global movement working toward a so-called bioeconomy. Its goal isn’t limited to replacing plastics but takes aim in any respect conventional synthetic products — including chemicals, concrete, and steel — which might be toxic to make or use, difficult to recycle, and have outsize carbon footprints. Of their place will come products comprised of plants, trees, or fungi — materials that, at their end of life, may be safely returned to the Earth or recycled repeatedly. The bioeconomy continues to be small, in the worldwide scheme of things, however the push to show successful research into manufactured products is growing, propelled by several aspects.

First is widespread disgust on the mounting environmental toll of plastic, including the proven fact that people and animals are ingesting it. Second is a flood of funding, especially in the USA and Europe, to speed up the transition away from products which might be non-biodegradable, toxic, and that produce carbon emissions. Last September, President Biden signed an executive order, with funding of greater than $2 billion, to launch the National Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Initiative to support research and development efforts, including the usage of sustainable biomass and waste resources to make non-toxic, bio-based fuels, chemicals, and fertilizers, and to construct reasonably priced housing.

And the Department of Defense recently funded what it calls a Manufacturing Innovation Institute called BioMADE, or the Bioindustrial Manufacturing and Design Ecosystem, a public-private partnership with its headquarters on the University of Minnesota. Bioindustrial manufacturing uses biological systems — including microbes like bacteria, yeast, and algae — to create latest materials or alternatives to existing petroleum-based materials. Ongoing projects include the creation of a bacterium, comprised of byproducts of the dairy industry, that displaces petroleum-based propylene because the feedstock for acrylic acid, which is used to make vinyl, paint, adhesives, diapers, and other products, and a bacterium that safely kills pathogens in chickens, replacing antibiotics.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture can be a serious player on this field. The agency recently announced it might allocate $41 million to develop latest markets for products comprised of wood, and it has long managed the BioPreferred Program, which requires federal agencies and contractors to preferentially purchase products, including cleaners, carpets, lubricants, and paints, with minimum bio-based content. Among the many products federal agencies at the moment are using is a transformer coolant comprised of soybean oil that’s 99 percent biodegradable in 21 days and Seventh Generation laundry detergent, which is comprised of 97 percent bio-based ingredients.
While the bioeconomy concept has been around for some time, the surge of funding and interest has seeded a variety of latest facilities and projects. The University of Maine’s Advanced Structures and Composites Center just manufactured a very recyclable house; the animal rights organization PETA runs the Material Innovation Initiative Center, which develops sustainable textiles without animal products. Oak Ridge National Laboratory has the Center for BioEnergy Innovation, which studies fuels comprised of plants and the bioenergy supply chain.

Across the Atlantic, Horizon Europe, the European Union’s key funding program, has dedicated no less than $2 billion to speed up its own transition to a bioeconomy. This system’s goals are to fund modern bio-based products to make them a less dangerous investment, to make certain the brand new products and systems perform as claimed, and to get them to market promptly.

Recent regulations governing waste streams are one other major driver of this transition. The EU has just proposed latest rules to require that each one product packaging be recyclable in an economically viable way and possibly reusable by 2030. The continent’s textile industry can be bracing for brand new sustainability rules. “The style industry from the EU’s standpoint shall be regulated from A to Z inside a few years,” Rannveig van Iterson, a senior consultant at Ohana Public Affairs, recently told Women’s Wear Every day. “It’s going from principally zero with no sustainability laws to sort of covering all the pieces from production to design to waste.” The whole strategy of making clothes, in other words, may soon be required to turn out to be bio-based.

The style industry is under enormous pressure to scrub up its act, says Frank Zambrelli, executive director of the Responsible Business Coalition at Fordham University, in Recent York. The sector produces 92 million tons of waste globally annually, and its CO2 emissions are projected to extend by 50 percent by 2030. Tanning hides for leather requires quite a few toxic chemicals, including chrome, formaldehyde, and arsenic. One promising leather alternative comes from mushrooms. In 2016, MycoWorks began producing a leather-like textile, called Reishi, from mushroom mycelium, which one study found has a carbon footprint that’s just 8 percent of bovine leather’s footprint. The corporate has been wildly successful, and now produces textiles starting from sheets to canvas to automotive seats for major brands. Based in Emeryville, California, MycoWorks has greater than 160 employees and just broke ground on a 150,000 square-foot plant.

Concerns about looming restrictions have led to an enormous push to scale up latest, safer materials. “There are increasingly and more responsible options,” says Zambrelli. “Lots of these alternatives have been around for some time, but we’re beginning to see real investments.”

As more regulations come into play, firms are going to need to take the disclosure of their products’ environmental information in official reporting more seriously, Zambrelli added. “While you’ve got the CFOs [chief financial officers] and general counsels involved within the reporting, suddenly there’s a legitimizing think about what they’re doing.”

Along with regulatory pressure, said Rob Handfield, who studies bio-based supply chains at North Carolina State University, there’s growing pressure from shareholders. “Increasingly firms now have investors which might be requesting science-based targets,” he said. “And there’s big customer pressure as well. They’re asking firms not only to make a commitment, but to place their money where their mouth is.”

It helps, too, that bio-based products are increasingly profitable. One estimate places the U.S. value of the bioeconomy at $1 trillion and the worldwide value at $4 trillion. A 2020 World Business Council for Sustainable Development report projects that the economic opportunity for bio-based products could grow to greater than $7 trillion by 2030.
Rapidly evolving technology is enabling latest approaches and products. Plain old low-tech wood — from trees — is getting an unlimited amount of attention as a substitute for steel and concrete in construction. (Steel manufacturing contributes about 8 percent of world carbon dioxide emissions, and concrete manufacturing contributes one other roughly 8 percent.)

A product called MettleWood, developed on the Center for Materials Innovation on the University of Maryland, is derived from soft wood from business plantations that has had its lignin removed. In a proprietary process, the lignin-free wood is then densified under high pressure, creating wood that its maker claims is 80 percent lighter than steel, 20 percent stronger, and roughly half the fee. InventWood, the corporate that makes MettleWood, just received a $20 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to scale up production.

The University of Maine’s Advanced Structures and Composites Center recently showed off a 3D-printed house comprised of a mixture of forest byproducts from the state’s quite a few sawmills: sawdust, wood flour (a really wonderful sawdust), and a bio-resin whose ingredients haven’t yet been disclosed. The whole envelope of the home — partitions, floor, and roof — is printed from wood fibers and bio-resins and insulated with one hundred pc wood insulation.

“This material is recyclable,” said Evan Gilman, the middle’s chief operations engineer. “If in 100 years this house becomes unusable, you would take the fabric, grind it up, and print one other home or other structure or something else useful. It may very well be repurposed for the longer term.”

Mass timber, also generally known as cross-laminated timber, can be increasingly popular as a constructing material. Constituted of pieces of wood laminated or nailed together, it’s in some ways stronger than steel and concrete. And since the wood stays intact for the lifetime of the constructing, it is going to sequester carbon for many years and even longer — potentially converting buildings from carbon sources to carbon sinks.

While research and development are on the upswing, scaling up from lab-made samples to mass production is the following and greater hurdle. Actually, the gap between the invention and successful marketing of a latest product or process is thought by enterprise capitalists because the “valley of death.” The U.S. does “thoroughly on the R and D phase, and we’ve got some commercial-scale production,” said Melanie Tomczak, BioMADE’s chief technology officer. “However it’s that middle, that pilot-plant production, that we don’t have. There hasn’t been incentive at that scale.”

There’s also concern that bio-based products are prone to “greenwashing” — overselling their environmental bona fides — or to unintended consequences. Eighteen years ago, for instance, the federal government greatly expanded a program to encourage biofuel production, mostly from corn, as a technique to cut down on CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. Now greater than a 3rd of the U.S. corn crop goes to biofuels. One recent study, though, found that the federal incentives to grow corn for ethanol led to land conversion to cropland, which caused the discharge of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, offsetting gains from this system.

And while constructing with mass timber could well be more sustainable than constructing with steel and concrete, depending on quite a few aspects — including how long the beams are kept intact — the demand for mass timber may result in more logging.

While a real bioeconomy is a good distance from fruition, increased attention to and funding of the sector is creating momentum. “It’s been area of interest and stylish,” noted Joel Tickner, a professor of public health on the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and founding father of the Green Chemistry and Commerce Council. “Now it’s growing, and it’s not as area of interest and stylish.”

A big a part of the battle may simply be public awareness. “We want more early adopters to drive the economy of scale,” said the University of Maine’s Gilman. “The technologies exist, but they should not being utilized because they aren’t as efficient yet, or people just don’t understand the potential. We want momentum, some early adopters to purchase into it. That can really drive development.”